A new Cell cover has been published on June 2, 2016, on identifying high-throughput, noncoding regulatory variations using the example of Mendel’s pea flower tessellation based upon M.C. Escher. Each flower is based upon the principle of geometry and fits exactly into it’s neighbors, making it impossible to distinguish individual variations. This intermixing is broken by the red color of one of the flower. Just like this analogy, Ryan Tewhey and his team discovered a method to detect a single mutation from seemingly undistinguishable variants.

The artwork was created using traditional pen & ink, watercolor and Photoshop. You can find the original issue here.

This is an alternative image using Darwin’s finches, which was not published, but used for the slider image on the Cell website: